The expressive content of the ad-adjectival tai ‘too’ in mandarin chinese: evidence from large online corpora

Abstract

There are two competing analyses for the semantics of the ad-adjectival modifier tai ‘too’ in Mandarin Chinese. On the homophonous account, there are two tais: one tai is a canonical degree adverb, while the other is a subjective intensifier expressing the speaker’s evaluation. On the unified account, tai is essentially a degree adverb, and the subjective evaluation of tai is attributed to pragmatic inferencing in the pragmatic domain. Both of these accounts face empirical challenges. An alternative analysis in the multidimensional, use-conditional framework is proposed. On the present account, the meanings of tai operate on two dimensions: in the descriptive (truth-conditional) dimension, tai contributes some degree-related semantics, while in the expressive (use-conditional) dimension, tai contributes some expressive meaning expressing the speaker’s subjective (mostly negative) evaluation towards x holding to a high degree. Data from large collections of online commodity reviews (more than 12,000 reviews; over 335,000 characters) provides quantitative support for this multidimensional analysis.